Stuff I have been watching and so on

James Agate, Taylor and Burton, Erich Fromm, USA for Africa, James Brown etc

I am writing a movie set in Hollywood in the 1920s. I have been working on it for a while now, in the old familiar rhythm: draft, silence, hope, notes, despair/ draft, silence, hope, notes, despair etc. I’m in despairing mode this week. I might stay here forever, so as not to have to deal with the next lot of hope (or, frankly, the notes). At the weekend I noticed a collection of film reviews by James Agate on my bookshelves, and wondered whether dipping in to it would help in some way: Agate, better known as a theatre critic and a diarist, wrote about movies for the Tatler and other London newspapers and magazines until his death in 1947. Unfortunately this collection, Around Cinema, begins pretty much with the birth of the talkies, and my central character, a dog, was killed by the advent of sound.

But the dippage was pretty interesting. The years covered in this collection are 1928-1945, seventeen years. in which the cinema indisputably became an art form. And Agate is a lot of fun to read: he rambles at length about anything that comes into his head, usually in an amusing, langorous, Wodehousian fashion, and then suddenly remembers that he is supposed to be telling you whether a film is any good or not. Actually, that’s not quite true: sometimes he wants to tell us whether a cinema is any good or not, this being a time when cinemas were suddenly appearing all over London. (In the early reviews, Agate helpfully tells you where the film is actually showing.)

He casts an eye over the Trocadero at the Elephant and Castle (for non-English readers, the Elephant and Castle is an area of south-east London), a six-thousand-seater theatre with a £15,000 organ, at a time when you could buy a house for £750. Presumably the organ was made redundant a couple of decades later.). He visits the new Brixton Astoria, and talks about Brixton in south London, eleven minutes from the West End by tube, as if it were somewhere in Scotland. What provincial readers would have made of these reviews I have no idea. Talk about the metropolitan elite.

When he does go to the theatre to see a movie, he doesn’t necessarily stick with it. His review of King’s Row contains what he admits is a “dreadful confession”: “This is that I left the picture house three-quarters of the way through the film!”. Don’t you love that cheeky exclamation mark? He thought very highly of Sullivan’s Travels, though, I was happy to see. In the programme - who knew that you used to be able to buy a programme for a movie? - he reads the promise that ~Preston Sturges’ masterpiece is ‘a picture that will never be forgotten’’. “ I settled into my seat determined to forget it. Then the extraordinary thing happened. I find myself thinking that here was a film that I should certainly remember.” He wasn’t so keen on Citizen Kane.